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The Fruits Of Our Labour: An Avocado’s Story

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Grocery

The Fruits Of Our Labour: An Avocado’s Story
A dissertation by Freddie Abrahams, submitted as part of their BA Geography degree at the University of Birmingham, UK.
Sample pages from Introduction, Methodology & Findings in slideshow above. Click them to read the dissertaion.

Undergraduate student Freddie Abrahams is shocked to discover that the Carmel-branded, ‘Produce of Israel’ avocados he eats may be grown on illegally seized Palestinian land. There’s a campaign in the UK to boycott these fruits. So he contacts Agrexco, the Israeli company that supplies them, and asks if it’s possible to find out for himself. He travels to Israel and ends up on kibbutz farms. They’re not on Palestinian land. And they’re not farmed by Palestinian people. The people he meets are migrant workers from Ethiopia, Thailand and other countries. He’s baffled. The boycott protestors are so angry. They say that all Israeli avocados should be boycotted. But the Agrexco managers he’s met have helped him so much with his research. They have been so open. He hasn’t seen any avocados being grown on Palestinian land. But Agrexco wouldn’t help him to see that, would they? His research does throw some doubt on facts of the boycott. So what’s his dissertation about? Following acovados? And/or the politics of knowledge in following avocados. What research are thing-followers allowed to do? What access can they gain to what spaces? Who gives permission? Who shapes what they learn to see? Freddie’s research was unusually easy to do.

Dissertation reference: Freddie Abrahams (2007) The Fruits Of Our Labour: An Avocado’s Story. BA Geography Dissertation: University of Birmingham, UK (followthethings.com/the-fruits-of-our-labour-an-avocados-story.shtml last accessed <insert date here>)

Page reference: Freddie Abrahams (2011) The Fruits Of Our Labour: An Avocado’s Story. followthethings.com/the-fruits-of-our-labour-an-avocados-story.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 60 minutes.

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Broccoli & Desire: Global Connections & Maya Struggles In Postwar Guatemala

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Grocery

Broccoli & Desire: Global Connections & Maya Struggles In Postwar Guatemala
An academic book by Edward F. Fischer & Peter Benson published by Stanford University Press.
Google Books preview embedded above.

There are shoppers in Nashville USA who are conscious about their health and shop for healthy vegetables like broccoli in their local supermarkets. There are farmers in Guatemala who are trying to hold onto their land and to make a living by growing vegetables like brocolli for export markets like the USA. Each has their own rich and fascinating story to tell about their lives, their work, their dreams and desires for a better future. In this book, their lives are seen as interdependent as the authors travel along Brocolli’s supply chain, connecting these worlds and lives through detailed ethnographic fieldwork and description. They find that shoppers’ and farmers’ lives, and the impacts that they have on one another, are bound together in complex geographical and historical webs of connection. Like the best ‘follow the thing’ work, this study of a commodity that many wouldn’t think twice about on the supermarket shelf. But, once you start to examine it, ask questions about it, and start following it, what you find is often staggering in its contrasts, connections, depth and feeling. For the authors, the concept of ‘desire’ is something that this vegetable’s farmers and shoppers have in common. Could shoppers’ desire for cheap food be re-aligned into a desire for more equitable relations with farmers (even if this might cost a bit more)? Can there be foods that are good for the health and wellbeing of everyone in their supply chains? This is an admirable intention, but we haven’t been able to tell if and how this book encouraged others to think this was and to act on this way of thinking. What impact can an academic book have?

Page reference: Keith DellaGrotta and Meredith Weaver (2011) Broccoli & Desire: Global Connections & Maya Struggles In Postwar Guatemala. followthethings.com/broccoli-desire-gobal-connections-maya-struggles-in-postwar-guatemala.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 12 minutes.

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The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London

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Home & Auto

The Oil Road: Journeys From The Caspian Sea To The City Of London”
A non-fiction travelogue by James Marriott & Mika Minio-Paluello, published by Verso.
Google Books preview embedded above.

‘Oil corporation resisters’ James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello travel the length of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline which carries crude oil from Azerbaijan’s Caspian Sea oilfields to refineries in Europe and, from there, into the region’s cars, buses & other oil-burning machines. They find this oil’s human stories, secret places and complex connections, and companies and governments that don’t want them to be revealed. They investigate how British Petroleum – which operates and co-owns it – wields incredible power over the governments of the countries the pipeline passes through that it is able to sweep aside everyone and everything in its path. The Oil Road paints a picture of the West’s ‘energy imperialism’ and insatiable addiction to oil. But this is far from a dry academic or NGO report of ‘energy security’ and oil geopolitics. Rather, it’s a vivid piece of industrial / infrastructural travel writing. A page-turning detective thriller that’s accessible to readers who don’t identify as oil-geeks. The authors use a familiar road trip format for political advocacy, to ‘show the filthy entrails of the global economy close up’, as one commenter puts it. Some commenters rage at BP, and/or say the authors are obviously a biased against BP, and/or bemoan the lack of alternatives and/or express greater worries about the ‘carbon web’ that the book vividly – but only partly – reveals. This is thing-following in multiple ways. It follows oil along a pipeline. It follows the pipeline itself. And it follows the money generated by the oil flowing along the pipeline.

Page reference: Molly Mansfield, Louise Ford, Olivia Rogers, Millie Smith, Bryony Board & Charlotte Watts (2013) The Oil Road. followthethings.com/the-oil-road.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 33 minutes.

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Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas

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Home & Auto

Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas
A blog post by Peter Forman originally published on the followthethings.com blog.
Available in full below. Originally published here.

PhD student Peter Forman wants to follow the thing, but his thing is natural gas. That’s a difficult thing to follow. Most of the things that people follow could be held in their hand, placed in their shopping bag. But it’s difficult and dangerous to do that with gas. Most of the things that people follow clearly come from somewhere. This banana was grown in this country. This phone was assembled in that country. But natural gas molecules from different sources get mixed up, so you can’t follow this commodity from source to destination, from production to consumption. It also gets from A to B underground, along pipes whose exactly network is a closely guarded secret. So how do you follow gas? For Peter, you find the places where it comes to the surface, in infrastructure, where it leaks, where the gas company vans and workers are digging holes, mending and replacing piping, that kind of thing. Thing-followers know that their thing is going to be a co-author of their work. It’s going to shape the way they work, and how they can study it. Nothing is impossible to follow, you just need some creative thinking, theorising and fieldwork strategies to work it out. As Peter says a the end of his post, ‘Every “thing” introduces its own challenges for study, and as thing-followers, we must be attentive to these specificities, continue to develop novel strategies for dealing with these difficulties, and continue to share our experiences of the challenges encountered.’ He’s sharing his experiences below.

Page reference: Pete Forman (2024) Hard To Follow Things: Natural Gas. followthethings.com/hard-to-follow-things-natural-gas.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 14 minutes.

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China, Britain And The Nunzilla Conundrum

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Gifts & Seasonal

China, Britain And The Nunzilla Conundrum
A radio documentary presented by Anna Chen (a.k.a. Madam Miaow), produced by Sally Heaven for BBC Radio 4.
Audio clip embedded above. Listen to the full radio documentary on the BBC website here (when available, with account, screengrab above) and on Box of Broadcasts here (with University subscription).

Chinese-English comedian and writer Anna Chen loves kitsch, ‘tat’, and (to some) offensive ‘stocking filler’ gifts like the clockwork fire breathing nun ‘Nunzilla’ and ‘Dashboard Jesus’ (not to mention elastic band holder ‘Mummy Mike’ and singing fish ‘Billy Bass’). Unsurprisingly, they’re ‘Made in China’ but, she wants to find out, what do they tell us and the people who design and make them about Western culture, religion and values? What gets lost and found in translation? And what do the factory workers who make them think they are for? How do they imagine the people who buy them? And what can tracing the relations between the designers, makers and consumers of cheap plastic kitsch tat tell us about China-UK relations? This is a serious piece of cross-cultural commodity following. It’s enjoyable and worrying. But there aren’t any exploited workers. What’s it hoping to achieve?

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) China, Britain And The Nunzilla Conundrum. followthethings.com/china-britain-and-the-nunzilla-conundrum.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 15 minutes.

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Banksy’s Slave Labour

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Home & Auto | Gifts & Seasonal

Banksy’s Slave Labour
Street art by Banksy briefly located on the wall of a Poundland Store in Wood Green, London.
Removed.

It’s 2012. Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee is being celebrated in the UK. The London Olympics are also taking place. There’s Union Jack bunting everywhere. It’s cheaply and readily available in discount stores like Poundland. Including one in Peckham, South London. Where the street artist Banksy paints a mural of a child hunched over a sewing machine, making them in India. They spill onto the pavement. It’s a true story. But, like most of Banksy’s street art, it’s quickly stolen and auctioned on the international art market. The story goes viral. That’s usually what trade justice activists want. But that viral story isn’t about slave labour at all. Is the international market for celebrity street art, and the value of Banksy’s work within it, an effective channel to persuade retailers like Poundland to remove child labour from their supply chains?

Page reference: Lydia Dean, Lucinda Armstrong, Jessica Bains-Lovering, Emily Hill, Harriet Allen & Rose Cirant-Carr (2019) Banksy’s Slave Labour (taster). http://followthethings.com/banksy-slave-labour.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes.

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Santa’s Workshop

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Gifts & Seasonal

Santa’s Workshop
An NGO Report written by Krista Bjurling for Swedwatch and a documentary directed by Lotta Ekelund & Krista Bjurling and produced by Lotta Ekelund for Lotta Films and The Fair Trade Center.
Screenshot slideshow embedded above. Download the report here. Search online to stream the film here.

Swedish toy companies and retailers seem sure that the things they have ‘Made in China’ are produced ethically. But what can they know about working conditions from audit reports and their own factory visits? NGO Swedwatch travels to China to find out, working with local labour activists to write a report and make a short film. What they find may temporarily ruin Christmas, but can it also change the ways that consumers and companies source toys in the future? As one commenter put it, ‘It’s fascinating to watch the blame being pushed around. It’s the worker’s fault, no, it’s the factories’ fault, no, it’s the client’s fault and last but not least, it’s the customer’s fault. The head in the sand attitude is quite remarkable.’ What’s fascinating to us is that, despite one union official in the film asking consumers NOT to stop buying the toys that the workers make, for some audience members that’s the only way to respond. So what other ways can audiences react? How can filmmakers control this? Will there always be audience members who simply want to disengage?

Page reference: Matthew Chambers, Millie Daglish, Sophie Rendell, George Stapleton, Georgie Thompson & Franziska Nuss (2024) Santa’s Workshop. followthethings.com/santasworkshop.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 37 minutes.

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Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat

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Grocery

Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat
A scene from a documentary film called ‘Kino-Eye’, directed by Dziga Vertov.
Film embedded above, scene starts at 7.00 and finishes at 14.08. Search online to stream here and to buy DVD here.

When the genre of documentary film was in its infancy, Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov used it to show how food shopping involves relations with hidden places, processes and people. In one extended scene from his experimental documentary Kino-Eye – which starts with an intertitle saying ‘Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat’ – the film follows a cut of meat that she buys in reverse motion, from a cooperative market, via the slaughterhouse where it is put back into the cow, who then stands up, walks backwards into the train, which returns the cow to the fields where it grazed. Vertov’s message to the film’s audience is to buy your meat from a workers’ co-operative supermarket. If Marx had been a filmmaker, he could have made this sequence to show a commoditty’s hidden relations. For us, it’s surprising that one of the earliest and most influential documentary filmmakers made follow thing work, to show audiences where commodities came from, what difference their purchase choices made, because meat’s system of provision mattered. Vertov also used techniques of montage, reverse sequencing, extremes of light and shade, in-shot camera motion, and sped up and slowed down the pace of scenes in order to ‘move’ his audiences kinaesthetically. So, is this some of the most innovative follow the things work you’ll ever see? Or a meaningless jumble? Either way, it’s had a significant influence on the ‘follow the thing’ genre’s academic and activist work.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Kopuchiska’s Mother Is Shopping For Meat. followthethings.com/kinoeye.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 18 minutes.

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Primark – On The Rack

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Fashion

Primark – on the rack
A documentary film presented by Tom Heap & produced by Frank Simmonds with Dan McDougall for BBC TV’s Panorama series.
Screenshot slideshow of the contested scene embedded above. Watch on Box of Broadcasts (with institutional login) here.

The BBC produces an exposé of cheap clothing retailer Primark. It finds children making its clothes, and sewing and testing their sequins, in factories, slums and refugee camps in India. Primark is asked to contribute to the film before it’s shown. Instead, they decide to cut ties with the supply chains featured, then launch a website to counter the film’s claims. They research the film’s research to pick apart its claims, and then complain to the BBC that one 45 second scene (the one in the screenshots above) is fake. Their critic-silencing strategy has mixed success. The BBC is forced to admit that it cannot be 100% sure that the scene wasn’t faked, and the Panorama team are forced to hand back an award they were given for the film. But Primark’s persistent public attempts to silence this investigative journalism draws attention – for years – to the company’s reputation as the ‘poster boy of child labour in the UK’. Supporters of the film highlight the other 3,555 minutes of the film that Primark didn’t claim the producers had faked? Then, 5 years after the film was broadcast, the Rana Plaza factory complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh collapses and over a thousand garments workers are crushed to death making high street clothes. Journalists, filmmakers and others keep this tragedy relentlessly in the news. UK newspaper headlines refer to this as the ‘Primark factory’. There’s no way that this footage is fake. Primark has to react differently this time.

Page reference: Kate Adley, Richard Keeble, Pippa Russell, Noora Stenholm, William Strang and Tuuli Valo (2025) Primark – on the rack. followthethings.com/primark-on-the-rack.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 124 minutes.

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Fugitive Denim

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Fuel & Auto

Fugitive Denim
A non-fiction book by Rachel Louise Snyder published by W.W. Norton & Company.
Preview available on Google Books (embedded above).

Journalist Rachel Louise Snyder visits five countries and talks with factory workers, designers and many others who work in the global denim trade to make a pair denim jeans. She’s trying to appreciate the complex geographies connecting the people (she jokes) ‘in our pants’. To do so, she meets and works alongside the people who pick their cotton, weave their cloth, design, sew and sell them. But this isn’t another ‘sweatshop’ exposé. It’s charming, funny, haunting. And it’s showing what’s possible. The jeans she chooses to follow are more ‘progressive, humane [and] environmentally secure’ than most. So, if one brand can make jeans better, what’s stopping the others?

Page reference: Gabriela Camargo, You Bin Kang and Yvonne Yu (2011) Fugitive Denim. followthethings.com/fugitive-denim.shtml last accessed (<insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 20 minutes.

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